I am a Gen Xer, and I’ve been having some conversations about photography and selfies lately, and I want to share a little bit, because I think younger queer people don’t quite understand what things used to be like.
I have no snapshots of the era of my life in which I was smootching girls behind the tilt-a-whirl at a shitty traveling carnival in a dusty empty lot. In fact, I have no pictures of any of my friends from that era aside from yearbook pictures of the friends who were in my school. I was a little goth teenager and many of my friends were also punk queers. We could not take pictures of each other.
Why? Because pictures were taken on film. And film needed to go somewhere to be developed. And if there were pictures of people “being gay” then sometimes your whole roll would disappear at the photo processor. Or your 36 exposure roll would return only 32 pictures to you. Because the processor would censor it. And aside from that, you had to be cautious about whether a photograph would somehow be seen by parents, who could kick your friend out of their house. Just because someone was holding hands in the background of a photo.
Snapshots were for kids who did sports and wholesome activities.
A little later, I had a friend who took photography and had access to the school photo lab (the art teacher didn’t care as long as no one was developing nudity), and there were some photographers who hung out with the skater kids. But prior to that, there was a whole era of my life, people who were super important to me for a time, that I just don’t have pictures of. At all. Because it wasn’t safe.
I found myself recently explaining this to a younger coworker and another colleague in the meeting, a gay man about my age, was nodding along. This was an important facet of life if you were a queer teen in the 80s. You didn’t have pictures of your people until you knew someone with use of a darkroom.
